The Israeli army said on Saturday, July 13, that it had targeted two senior Hamas leaders in the southern Gaza Strip. “The army targeted Mohammed Deif and Rafa Salama […] who were two masterminds of the October 7 massacre,” she said in a statement, without specifying whether the two men were dead. “The strike was carried out in a fenced area managed by Hamas and where, according to our information, only Hamas terrorists were present and where there were no civilians.”
According to Hamas, these are “false allegations aimed at masking the scale of the terrible massacre”. Because the Palestinian Islamist movement reported at least 71 dead and 289 wounded in an Israeli strike on the al-Mawasi displaced persons camp in the south of the Gaza Strip.
The Ministry of Health of his government denounced, in a statement, “a heinous massacre of the occupation (Israel, editor’s note) against citizens and displaced persons in the al-Mawasi area of Khan Younis”. Questioned by AFP, the Israeli army responded that it was examining this information.
Collapse of the health system
The Israeli Prime Minister’s office recalled that Benjamin Netanyahu had “given, at the beginning of the war, a standing instruction to eliminate the senior leaders of Hamas.” He “has been informed of the developments” and “will make an assessment of the situation today” with security officials, according to his office.
The area of al-Mawasi, on the coast between Rafah and Khan Younis, had been declared a “humanitarian zone” by Israel, theoretically safe for the displaced. “There are still many bodies of martyrs scattered in the streets, under the rubble and around the tents of displaced people that cannot be reached because of the intense gunfire from the occupation,” reported Mahmoud Bassal, spokesman for the Civil Defense, considering that it was a “new massacre.”
The victims were transferred to several hospitals in the region. At the Kuwaiti hospital in Rafah, director Suhaib al-Hams said most of the injuries were serious, including amputations. He called the situation “a real disaster that comes in the midst of the collapse of the health system,” according to a statement.
UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, estimates that around 1.5 million people are in the al-Mawasi area, in Khan Younis and Rafah, a spokeswoman told AFP. This past week, four schools sheltering displaced people were targeted by strikes in four days, killing at least 49 people, according to sources in Gaza including Hamas. Israel had said it was targeting “terrorists”.